Storage Survey Highlights Challenges of Restricted Hiring Trends

Enterprise Storage Forum’srecent survey revealed that although many respondents are investing in new storage technologies, the majority are not adding IT staff - creating big challenges.

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Enterprise Storage Forum’s recent survey on data storage revealed that while many companies are investing in new technologies, the majority are not adding IT staff. Entitled Data Storage Trends 2018, the survey asked about hiring trends. In response, 61% answered, “We are not hiring new personnel.” An additional 17% responded, "I'm unsure if my company plans to hire more storage personnel."

See the highlights from our survey of the data storage world in this 9-minute video.

Low Hiring Creates Storage Challenges

The flat IT headcount that the survey reveals appears to be the case for several reasons. Some companies added large numbers of staff and now find themselves overstaffed – not to mention having to report ballooning operations expenditures on annual financial reports. These companies may lay-off extra personnel, but others choose not to.

Some companies reassign IT personnel to strategic projects, train staff in upper level skills, and only hire to replace key expertise. Others have spent time and money on implementing highly efficient IT procedures, so they do not need to hire more staff.

Whatever the reason for the flat headcount, new storage technologies and sheer data growth are forging ahead. IT departments that are too lean and staffers who lack higher level skills will struggle to keep up.

Despite flat employee headcount, IT has some big challenges to meet. The survey also asked the question: “What is the biggest challenge involved with operating your current storage infrastructure?”

Again, while these responses speak to many issues, at one level they relate to staffing. Respondents identified these leading challenges (which are 3 of the top 5 challenges):

· High costs of operation: 14%. Even with a small team, IT staff’s salaries and benefits are usually the highest operational costs in IT. This puts pressure on all IT departments to save costs in other areas or face even more changes to headcount. Cloud migration represents another large operational expense for IT, especially in companies without an IT chargeback process. The more that a flat IT department lowers other operational costs, the less likely senior management is to decrease headcount as a cost-savings measure.

· High maintenance requirements: 10%. IT staff time spent on storage maintenance officially falls under operational costs. High maintenance requirements also cost storage admin time, which subtracts from their ability to use upper level skills and to run strategic IT projects. Smaller staff cannot simply offload tasks to new hires: they need to conduct maintenance and work on high value ROI activities.

Take a look at the key qualities that companies look for in new storage technologies (see below). The survey’s major findings for making storage work with lean IT are taking advantage of new automation technologies, simplified storage management, and leveraging cloud data storage.

How can companies with lean IT departments efficiently run their storage infrastructure and invest in new technologies? Let’s look at best practices for assuring that IT can meet the challenges of a dynamic and evolving storage environment, even if they are not hiring new personnel.

· Automation, 35% – Simplifying storage management was important to our respondents. This is especially true with IT groups who cannot easily add new personnel. Granted that many IT departments simplify storage management by turning storage and its management over to a cloud provider. However, few companies turn over all applications and data to the cloud, so IT must effectively manage on-premises storage.

Automating routine IT activities enables storage admins to increase service levels without adding staff. For example, admins can protect performance on primary systems by automating storage tiering. Typical paths include tiering from primary storage to active archives and then the cloud, or from primary storage directly to cool or cold cloud tiers. Additional rich automation is dynamic upgrades and policy-driven storage management.

Automating backup lets storage admins easily manage backup and observe compliant retention schedules. Even a lean team can effectively manage large volumes of backup data with automation and searchability.

One key point about cloud and IT staffing: Cloud expertise. Hire or train IT personnel who know how to work with cloud providers to optimize individual cloud storage settings, including data protection and security.

According to our respondents, end-of-life is a driving force behind new hardware, software and services investments. Take advantage of the changes you know are coming to plan for current and future storage needs. By taking the time to make strategic plans, IT saves time and money and improves service quality – even in the age of low headcount lean IT.

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